Are you concerned about flying?

[jontysafe]

I really don't fly as often as some here, probably between 70-100 flights a year for the last six years. I must admit I had doubts I could actually do the job I was so petrified for the first year, maybe longer. I must admit I still get sweaty palms on some landings. To start with, as others have said, I would listen to every single noise. The throttle back on noise abatement take offs would send me shaking and sweating.
Nowadays it really is like a bus with wings, I find it difficult to stay awake, try not to eat the food and hope there aren't too many screaming kiddies on board.

Anyone else noticed how airline food gives you the Tom tits?

[Pothole]

Bradgate said:

In 2010 almost 3000 people died on Britain's roads. The number who died in commercial aviation was zero.

Edited by Bradgate on Monday 17th September 22:36

No, it was 828

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/04/air-cr...

[Justin Cyder]

If Bradgate was making the comparison about the UK as stated in his road deaths figure, then he is correct. Zero in commercial aviation in the UK in 2010.

[missdiane]

Pothole said:

o, it was 828

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/04/air-cr...

Is that British compared to world though

[Justin Cyder]

Does it matter? Bradgate was making a comparison within the UK. If you added up road deaths worldwide vs 828 aviation deaths worldwide, I am sure you would come up with an enormous disparity, but you are not comparing apples with apples in doing so.

Interesting article in the Grauniad about surviving air crashes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/feb/21/plane...

[robmlufc]

Your chances of surviving a serious crash are more to do with how big a crater the aircraft makes than if you listened to the safety brief.

[Pixel Pusher]

I have no problem with flying itself; actually travelling on a plane, but I can't stand the whole experience of flying.

The airport, the "herding", the queueing etc just leaves me cold.

I haven't flown for probably 8 or 9 years now and only holiday in France or Spain so I can drive.

[Deanno1dad]

ditchvisitor said:

There is another one where a very very minor snag caused an airliner to circle whilst they tried to fix the problem, they promtly ran out of fuel and crashed into a mountain, I think it was a Greek airline in the 90's.

the scary thing is this airline operated from cyprus(Helios airlines)..they only had two 737 aircraft..the previous year I flew on one of them..scary to think that theres a very strong chance that the plane i used crashed the following year.

[Justin Cyder]

The Helios crash was not a fuel starvation thing. It was a gradual decompression that caused every soul to become unconscious. The flight deck crew failed to comprehend the warnings from the instruments regulating the cabin pressure. The 737 crashed when it ran out of fuel but not because it ran out of fuel.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6036507.st...

[McSam]

Pommygranite said:

McSam said:

Pommygranite said:

Its bullst all the 'more chance of a crash on the way to the airport' stats - at least the way to the airport might be a scrape, bump or full death but at least crashes on the road have variable chances of surviving and happen without much warning. Plane crashes seem to be certain screaming death after spending minutes of bowel emptying awareness surrounded by screaming people

OK, then - how about the also entirely true statement that you're more likely to be killed outright instantly in a road accident than you are in a plane?

Or perhaps that you're more likely to die very slowly and agonisingly as a result of a road accident, rather than in a plane?

Both overwhelmingly correct.

You're also quite unlikely to be buried alive, get ebola, be raped in prison, chopped up by a Mexican drug gang, eaten alive, or go to war but they're all fking scary thoughts nonetheless.

I know - but it's extremely hard to remove people's inner fears, so the best answer is to soothe them into believing they'll "never" happen!


The Tenerife 747 collision is the one that is actually most worrying to me. It's so easily done. All it really boiled down to was the communication "we're at take-off" being understood to mean they were sitting at the runway take-off threshold waiting for clearance, when in fact he meant they were already going down it at full power. Another 747, which was actually Pan Am's Clipper Victor, the first ever 747 in commercial service, was taxiing across the runway (which is incredibly irregular but so short was space at the airport after the aforementioned bomb scare at Gran Canaria that jets were parked all over the taxiways).

The flight recording then, as far as I remember, has some communication from the tower asking the Clipper Victor to "report the runway clear". They say "We will report when we're clear", by which time the KLM pilot has already opened the taps to proceed down that runway. The logical assumption is that he hadn't heard the Pan Am crew reply, just hearing "runway clear" from the tower. The KLM first officer is halfway to figuring it out and says "Haven't they cleared the runway, then?"

His pilot says "Oh, yes."

A couple of seconds later as they're nearly at rotation speed, the Clipper Victor looms out of the fog broadside to them with nearly 400 aboard. The Clipper's crew can see the approaching lights, realise what's going on and pull full power to try and get off the runway before he gets there - in doing so they manage to save their own lives and the front quarter of their jet, but no more. The KLM pilot pulls up well under rotation speed and gets his nose clear, but drags the main gear and his engines right through the cabin of the Pan Am jet, ripping it apart. He gets her into the air, but is well out of control and has lost half his engines. The jet stalls, rolls and hits the deck only a couple of hundred yards away. It explodes and kills everybody aboard almost instantly.

On board the Clipper Victor, 335 have died and 60 or so, including all the crew, survive to get out through the holes ripped in the fuselage - so close was the KLM jet to killing them all too, the pilots couldn't shut down the engines because the switches on top of the cockpit had been ripped away.



Appreciate this isn't going to help allay fears of flying, but this crash was in 1977, and by far and away the chief cause was failures of radio communication. Any transmissions made simultaneously blurred into one another and only came through as a whistling static, and so while the Pan Am crew told the KLM jet exactly what they were doing when they realised he might be coming, the message never made it to their cockpit. Such things cannot happen now, and the ATCs at Tenerife had no ground radar. Nowadays, you would simply never attempt so many and complex flight movements in fog at all, never mind without radar.

[Justin Cyder]

Brilliant post. Much more than the rough sketch from me. I recall a documentary where the Pan Am flight engineer went back to Los Rodeos in the 90's & they were still able to pick up pieces of debris from the 747's off the airfield.

[ClaphamGT3]

Justin Cyder said:

They have in some respects. The Tenerife disaster which I think is still the single largest loss of life in a civilian accident was a series of factors as are most accidents rather than one single event. There had been a bomb scare at Gran Canaria which had closed it, forcing dozens of planes crowd into Los Rodeos which was fogged in. The captain of the KLM jumbo was the chief pilot & his ego & status played a huge role in the crash since, boiling it down, he had this notion that being the top pilot, he could not delay his passengers becaus

Unfortunately for them, even though his very junior first officer understood that another 747 hadn't cleared the runway they were now barrelling down, he even in that moment of clarity, didn't feel he could contradict his captain & consequently, he radioed to the tower 'we're taking off, uh...we are at take off' in an effort to tell them what was going on. Too late, the planes collided & 583 people died.

Its a salutory lesson that CRM is only an aid not a fail-safe; ultimately, if a captain can ignore both his 1st Officer and his Flight Engineer, one of whom tells him he is not ATC cleared for take-off and the other who tells him that there is a real prospect of another a/c on the runway then its value needs to be questioned.

I always feel that the KLM captain was, however, slightly scapegoated. I know Jonnie Hindsight is a bright lad but why didn't Los Rodeos ATC order both a/c to stationary whilst they worked out where they were on the airfield. Also, I think the Pan Am crew could have been more explicit that they were not clear of the runway and, having missed their turn-off, did not anticipate being so any-time soon.

The other thing that is pretty breath-taking is how close the KLM pilot came to avoiding the collission by executing a pre V1 rotation when every instinct in his body must have screamed for wheel brakes and full reverse thrust

[robmlufc]

Justin Cyder said:

The Helios crash was not a fuel starvation thing. It was a gradual decompression that caused every soul to become unconscious. The flight deck crew failed to comprehend the warnings from the instruments regulating the cabin pressure. The 737 crashed when it ran out of fuel but not because it ran out of fuel.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6036507.st...

Possibly thinking of this one. The wrong fuel gauge was fitted which indicated more fuel on board than there actually was.

Used in pretty much every Human Factors course I have been on since!

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/tuninter...

Edited by robmlufc on Tuesday 18th September 10:32

[McSam]

Justin Cyder said:

Brilliant post. Much more than the rough sketch from me. I recall a documentary where the Pan Am flight engineer went back to Los Rodeos in the 90's & they were still able to pick up pieces of debris from the 747's off the airfield.

Cheers - I compressed the radio traffic a lot so as not to bore people, but the idea and chief cause comes across the same!

I think, Clapham, you're absolutely right - but also that the ATCs were probably stting themselves with this sudden unprecendented volume of traffic, on top of nearby bomb scares, and then it's foggy.. wanting to keep things running smoothly, trust the pilots, and avoid any more scares must have factored into the judgements being made. Wrong, but human nature.

On the subject of Johnnie Hindsight.. I find it hard to imagine that if the KLM pilot had simply pushed the throttles right to the stop when he began his run, rather than just using normal takeoff power, he probably wouldn't have hit the Clipper. 5mm of lever travel would have saved 600 people.

[dave_s13]

McSam said:

know - but it's extremely hard to remove people's inner fears, so the best answer is to soothe them into believing they'll "never" happen!
....................

/shudder/

I've grown less bothered by the act of flying as I get older but hate the whole "travel" experience.

On the way to Thailand, second leg fro Abu Dhabi, the plane came to a very abrupt halt just at the start of the runway, emergency stop thing...we sat there for 2 hours, in the desert heat waiting to disembark and get onto a another plane

Coming home from Thailaind I acquired some "sleeping tablets" from some irish bird in the departure lounge. Now I'm 6'4" so will take anything I can get to try and make the impossible task of sleeping on a plane possible. These things worked and I woke up after 4 hours scrunched into the most uncomfortable position imaginable, both my legs were totally numb, completely and utterly numb. It took a full 30mins for the circulation to return and the ensuing pins and needles actually made me cry!!

Sadly I'm not in a position to fly business/1st class....I would imagine this makes it a rather more comfortable experience.

[Justin Cyder]

They were definitely overwhelmed at Los Rodeos & it was a world away in 1977 in terms of the way the technical side of flying was done. CRM really grew up because of disasters like Tenerife & The Saudi fire where everyone could have survived, but the captain effectively went into a form of denial with catastrophic consequences.

[ClaphamGT3]

Indeed - and if he hadn't re-fuelled with 55 tonnes of JP54 (enough for the return to Schipol) to save time instead of doing so on arrival at Las Palmas as planned, the take-off charactaristics of the plane would have been different and the explosion may have been less catastrophic.

Also, I understand that the KLM captain was world renowned as a 747 God and that both Los Rodeos ATC, Pan Am and, ultimately, even his own flight deck were loath to question his decision making.

Think that Sam is right about Los Rodeos ATC being totally overwhelmed by the number of movements on their airfield.

[Turbodiesel1690]

Generally I'm not concerned, I fly every week on business (usually N. Ireland to mainland UK) and long haul on occasion, the way I see it every single component on those things is designed to fly, not to mention the high redundancy built into the critical systems. The only time I was genuinely concerned on a flight was when landing into Frankfurt on a Lufthansa A321 in thick fog - all was going well, almost touched down when all of a sudden full power goes on and back up we go. It seemed quite violent and there were a few gasps amongst the passengers. The captain came on shortly afterwards to say they 'couldn't see the runway' and were 'circling the airfield for an automatic landing' - have to say it was the smoothest landing I've ever experienced, wish they would do it more often

[y2blade]

I hated flying for years and had a "I aint getting on no plane" attitude, due to having a horrible "pleasure" flight in a four-seater deathtrap during my teens, loads of turbulence and wind too I hated every second of it.

Then a few years back had no real viable option but to fly otherwise I'd miss out on a friends stag-do...It was great, really enjoyed the flight in a bigger aircraft and have flown within the British Isles a few times since.


We Will be taking our first longer flight next year as we are going to New York for my birthday.

Can't wait.

[otolith]

Ray Luxury-Yacht said:

So - let's have our first lesson, shall we, on what's safely possible, despite it appearing suicidal?

Huge, multi-engined 'Heavy' aircraft on final approach, laughing in the face of such trivia as 'wind shear'...

One linky of many on You Tube

Got to love Kai Tak airport, landing there used to be "an experience"

I've never felt nervous on big planes. Flying from Stockholm to Vaasa years ago on a little propeller plane was a little unnerving. Flying from Male to our resort on a seaplane last year even more so - but not enough to stop us going back this year.